Creative professional based in Arlington, MA. Specializing in web design for political campaigns, nonprofits, and small business.
More About Me
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I have a lot of thoughts on the music industry, some scattershot and incomplete, some fully formed and mostly coherent. Mostly I default to my standard media observation that the only important entities are the content producer and the consumer, with every middleman and distribution network on the chopping block at all times.
Music discovery is incredibly important in the successful propagation of acts and genres, and I’m fascinated by how quickly this process is evolving on the internet (in sharp contrast to the record industry’s death rattle protests). I like to blend objective and subjective assessments whenever possible, and both angles are well-represented.
Objectively, I love digging through Allmusic.com’s extensive database for recommendations of similar artists, threads connecting acts through genre development, and their extensive tagging discipline. Pandora is similarly objective in their goal of mapping the musical qualities of artists/songs/albums and spitting out a playlist of similarly constructed tracks. Last.fm and iTunes Genius depend heavily on the ‘neighbor’ principle, assuming that songs played together or in playlists by one user will lead to useful recommendations for someone with similar taste.
Subjective recommendations tend to be a bit murkier to pinpoint, but operate mostly on a trust ideal. Friends who I judge to have good taste in music will have an overwhelming impact on what I listen to, and radio stations that have established a particular sound will be trusted as well. The rise of mp3 blogs has multiplied this on the web, adding the instant impact of embedded tracks playable on demand. The Tumblr dashboard’s audio posts have an especially “sticky” quality, as the player is consistent visually, the users are “trusted” bloggers that I chose to follow, and the presentation in the timeline prompts an almost Pavlovian response to click play and listen to at least a minute or so of the track.
Despite what the record industry middlemen may claim, music creation is alive and well. Distribution networks and music discovery services are flourishing and evolving at a rapid (if anarchistic) pace, and even if monetization models are proving difficult to pinpoint, it probably has far more to do with the machinations of the record industry than it does with consumers. Viva la revolucion.
